The evaluation of the PACA regional public health plan: Reconciling the managerial, scientific and democratic finalities

Françoise Jabot, Jean Turgeon and Léopold Carbonnel

Evaluation and Program Planning, 2011, vol. 34, issue 3, 196-205

Abstract: For more than a decade now, evaluation has developed considerably in France, thanks in particular to the Société Française de l'Évaluation, whose charter sets out a number of principles designed to guide the work of evaluators. This article examines how the evaluation process surrounding a regional public health plan (referred to as PRSP) - itself being a new instrument for regional planning in France - accords with one of these principles, which specifies that evaluation must be framed according to "a three-fold logic involving public management, democracy and scientific debate." Our analysis shows that while this evaluation was driven primarily by managerial concerns (i.e., assessing the capacity of the plan to structure health policy in a region), it also provided an Opportunity for restoring dialogue with a range of actors by opening up a space of cooperation and consultation. In addition, in order to ensure the legitimacy of the evaluation's conclusions, the knowledge produced by the evaluators had to rest on an irreproachable methodology. This example illustrates how evaluation, in the French tradition, is a process that strives to reconcile the viewpoints and expectations of managers, scientists and the general public; it is also a process that brings out lines of tension and areas of complementariness between these three logics.

Keywords: Democracy; Debate; France; Management; Regional; health; planning; Pluralism; Evaluation; process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149718911000231
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:epplan:v:34:y:2011:i:3:p:196-205

Access Statistics for this article

Evaluation and Program Planning is currently edited by Jonathan A. Morell

More articles in Evaluation and Program Planning from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().